Abortion groups caught off guard

Anti-abortion groups leapt into action last month when the National Right to Life Committee warned that elective abortions would be covered under a Pennsylvania insurance program created by the health care reform law.

The Susan B. Anthony List and the Family Research Council blasted the news to the media and supporters. NRLC began scouring other state plans for similar provisions. Top congressional Republicans sent a letter of protest to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

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And within a day, the anti-abortion groups got what they wanted: a nationwide ban on coverage for most elective abortions in the so-called high-risk insurance pools, a position reaffirmed in a Health and Human Services regulation released on Thursday.

Abortion rights advocates were caught completely off-guard.

Planned Parenthood and NARAL didn’t publicly petition HHS until after the new ban was imposed. And it took sympathetic Democrats on the Hill a full 10 days to write a letter expressing disappointment with the HHS — and even then, they were so squeamish about the issue that they never even used the word “abortion” in their protest.

For abortion rights advocates, the HHS episode was both a reminder of the health reform battle they lost and a warning about the risks ahead: Having a president on their side doesn’t mean they can sit back and expect success.

“This is not the outcome we expected,” said Laurie Rubiner, Planned Parenthood vice president for public policy. “We now know we need to be vigilant to make sure there aren’t other areas of the law where there is silence. There is a whole host of areas that we’re going to be watching like a hawk.”

“We’re stuck in a slow backpedal,” said Laura MacCleery, government relations director for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “There needs to be a sense that, while health reform moves us forward, it moves us backwards in terms of reproductive rights.”

Abortion rights groups have long lamented the challenge of conveying a sense of urgency to their supporters when their policy positions align with those of the ruling party. Shortly after Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, NARAL saw donations drop “‘drastically’ because supporters thought the battle was over,” sociologist Suzanne Staggenborg writes in her book “The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict.”

Thus, President George W. Bush, while certainly not a political ally, did serve a purpose as a figure for abortion rights supporters to rally against and raise funds off of. NARAL’s political action committee, for example, had its flushest years during reelection bids of Bush and the first President Bush, hauling in $4 million in the 1992 election cycle and $3.2 million in 2004, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.